Download or read book Interpreting Charles Taylor s Social Theory on Religion and Secularization written by Germán McKenzie and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines “Taylorean social theory,” its sources, main characteristics and impact. Charles Taylor’s meta-narrative of secularization in the West, prominently contained in his major work A Secular Age (2007), has brought new insight on the social and cultural factors that intervened in such process, the role of human agency, and particularly on the contemporary conditions of belief in North America and Europe. This study discusses what Taylor’s approach has brought to the scholarly debate on Western secularization, which has been carried on mostly in sociological terms. McKenzie interprets Taylor’s views in a way that offers an original social theory. Such interpretation is possible with the help of sociologist Margaret Archer’s “morphogenetic theory” and by making the most of Taylor’s particular understanding of the method of the social sciences and of his philosophical views on human beings, knowledge and modernity. After exploring the philosophical and sociological sources informing Taylorean social theory and proposing its basic concepts and hermeneutic guidelines, the author compares it with two widespread theories of secularization: the now waning “orthodox” account and that proposed by Rational Choice Theory scholars, particularly prevalent in the United States. In doing so, the book shows in which ways Taylorean social theory supersedes them, what new issues it brings into the scholarly discussion, and what difficulties might limit its future development.
Download or read book A Secular Age written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
Download or read book Beyond Belief written by Robert N. Bellah and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-06-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Belief collects fifteen celebrated, broadly ranging essays in which Robert Bellah interprets the interplay of religion and society in concrete contexts from Japan to the Middle East to the United States. First published in 1970, Beyond Belief is a classic in the field of sociology of religion.
Download or read book Working with A Secular Age written by Florian Zemmin and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Taylor’s monumental book A Secular Age has been extensively discussed, criticized, and worked on. This volume, by contrast, explores ways of working with Taylor’s book, especially its potentials and limits for individual research projects. Due to its wide reception, it has initiated a truly interdisciplinary object of study; with essays drawn from various research fields, this volume fosters substantial conversation across disciplines.
Download or read book Charles Taylor s Vision of Modernity written by Christopher Garbowski and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Taylor is currently one the most renowned and influential contemporary philosophers. He is also widely quoted and discussed both in the social sciences and humanities. Taylor earns this attention through his remarkable capacity for presenting his conceptions in the broadest possible intellectual and cultural context. His philosophical intuition is fundamentally antinaturalistic, and tends toward developing broad syntheses without a trace of systematizing thinking, or any anarchic postmodernist methodology. His thought unites the past with the present, while culture is treated as a broad mosaic of discourses. Religion, art, science, philosophy, politics and ethics are all fields through which the Canadian philosopher deftly moves about in his search for their hidden structures and deepest sense. Taylor’s philosophical output is prodigious. Recently, as his monumental study A Secular Age (2007) indicates, he has been concentrating much of his attention on the problem of secularization.. The selection of contributions in the current volume proffer a penetrating cross section of Taylor’s thought. They are derived from a conference held in October 2008 in Lublin, Poland Although some of the articles are focused on a reconstruction of the philosopher’s concepts, most either engage in a polemic with elements of his thought or find inspiration in it for their own reflections. The contributions are grouped in four parts: 1) philosophy and the modern self; 2) the problem of secularization; 3) between liberalism and communitarianism; and 4) language, literature, and culture.
Download or read book A Critical Examination of the Underlying Sociological Theory of Secularization in the West in the Work of Charles Taylor written by German F. McKenzie and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarly debate on secularization in the West has been largely developed in sociological terms. Two extreme positions in the conversations are those I label as "orthodox" and "counter-orthodox", with several authors taking middle stances. "Orthodox" theorists affirm that modernity necessarily erodes religion, whereas "counter-orthodox" ones --also known as Rational Choice Theorists (RCT)-- see secularization as a self-limiting process within modernity. As the debate between these views has somewhat stalled, other perspectives have caught the interest of researchers. An important contribution among them is that made by Canadian thinker Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age (2007). This dissertation analyses the sociological basis of Charles Taylor's account of secularization in order to elucidate what new insights he brings to the debate on the issue. It relies on textual analysis of all the pertinent works by Taylor, as well as his classical and contemporary sociological influences. As a sociological framework, it relies on the scholarship of British sociologist Margaret Archer, particularly on her views about the relationship between social and cultural structures and human agency, as well as about social change. My claim is that it is possible to uncover a consistent "Taylorean sociology" in his work. This particular sociological approach finds its roots in Taylor's philosophical anthropology, his critique of mainstream social science, his position on the problem of human agency in sociology, and his affirmation of the inextricable linkage between the social and cultural realms. In this light, secularization in the West is better understood as the change of religion due to social movement dynamics which relocates the place of religion in society and in individual experience. This change has entailed the decline of some religious forms and the appearance of new ones, a process which is not linear but more of a zigzag-shape. In spite of some shortcomings, Taylorean sociology's account of religious change is consistent with an important body of empirical data. It supersedes important theoretical and methodological problems within "orthodox" and RCT-inspired explanations. In regard to the former, this is not surprising since such views have been marginalized by the most part of scholars today. However, in regard to the latter, criticisms advanced by Taylorean sociology are more interesting because of RCT's prevalence, particularly in North America's scholarship. Among the most important of them, is the inadequacy of considering structures as closed systems --something crucial for RCT, the diminished role given to cultural structures as compared to that of social structures in religious change, and the inadequacy of RCT's view of religious choice as one between options that appear before the human agent all at the same time and in a clear fashion. Among the new paths opened by Taylorean sociology for the study of secularization, the more important are its integration of human agency and structure, and its focus on our contemporary conditions of belief, particularly its view of the "immanent frame" as our given cultural context in the West, the notion of a continuum that goes between exclusive humanism and transformative religion, two extreme positions which fragilize each other and between which a myriad of unstable intermediate positions that are taken by many Westerners.
Download or read book The End s of Religion written by Eric Bain-Selbo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-13 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric Bain-Selbo argues that the study of religion-from philosophers to psychologists, and historians of religion to sociologists-has separated out the “ends” or goals of religion and thus created the conditions by which institutional religion is increasingly irrelevant in contemporary Western culture. There is ample evidence that institutional religion is in trouble, and little evidence that it will strengthen in the future, giving some reason to believe that we are in the process of seeing the end of religion. At the same time, various cultural practices have met in the past and continue to meet today certain fundamental human needs-needs that we might identify as religious that now are being fulfilled through what Bain-Selbo calls the “religion of culture.” The End(s) of Religion traces the way that the very study of religion has led to institutional religion being viewed as just one human institution that can address our particular “religious” needs rather than the sole institution to do so. In turn, ultimately we can begin to see how other institutions or forms of culture can function to serve these same needs or “ends.”
Download or read book A Secular Age Beyond the West written by Mirjam Künkler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Download or read book Academic Study of Religions in a Cognitive Anthropological and Sociological Perspective written by Tomáš Bubík and published by Palacký University Olomouc. This book was released on 2021 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book deals with current issues of the study of religion as an academic discipline, especially cognitive, anthropological and sociological research of religious thought and behaviour. Publikace pojednává o aktuálních problémech religionistiky jako akademické disciplíny, zejména pak o kognitivním, antropologickém a sociologickém výzkumu náboženského myšlení a chování.
Download or read book Secularism and Freedom of Conscience written by Jocelyn Maclure and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secularism: the definition of this word is as practical and urgent as income inequalities or the paths to sustainable development. In this wide-ranging analysis, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor provide a clearly reasoned, articulate account of the two main principles of secularism—equal respect, and freedom of conscience—and its two operative modes—separation of Church (or mosque or temple) and State, and State neutrality vis-à-vis religions. But more crucially, they make the powerful argument that in our ever more religiously diverse, politically interconnected world, secularism, properly understood, may offer the only path to religious and philosophical freedom. Secularism and Freedom of Conscience grew out of a very real problem—Quebec’s need for guidelines to balance the equal respect due to all citizens with the right to religious freedom. But the authors go further, rethinking secularism in light of other critical issues of our time. The relationship between religious beliefs and deeply-held secular convictions, the scope of the free exercise of religion, and the place of religion in the public sphere are aspects of the larger challenge Maclure and Taylor address: how to manage moral and religious diversity in a free society. Secularism, they show, is essential to any liberal democracy in which citizens adhere to a plurality of conceptions of what gives meaning and direction to human life. The working model the authors construct in this nuanced account is capacious enough to accommodate difference and freedom of conscience, while holding out hope for a world in which diversity no longer divides us.
Download or read book Charles Taylor written by Ruth Abbey and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Taylor is one of the most influential and prolific philosophers in the English-speaking world. The breadth of his writings is unique, ranging from reflections on artificial intelligence to analyses of contemporary multicultural societies and the role of religion in modern western societies. In this thought-provoking introduction to Taylor's work, Ruth Abbey outlines his ideas in a coherent and accessible way without unduly reducing their richness and depth. Taylor's reflections on the topics of epistemology, language, moral theory, selfhood, political theory, and religion form the core six chapters within the book. Retaining the thematic approach of the first edition, this second edition has been thoroughly revised, rewritten, and restructured. An ideal companion to Taylor's ideas and arguments, Charles Taylor is essential reading for students of philosophy, religion, and political theory, and will be welcomed by the non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to Taylor's large and challenging body of work.
Download or read book On Secularization written by David Martin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Secularization' has been hotly debated since it was first subjected to critical attention in the mid-sixties by David Martin, before he sketched a 'General Theory' in 1969. 'On Secularization' presents David Martin's reassessment of the key issues: with particular regard to the special situation of religion in Western Europe, and questions in the global context including Pentecostalism in Latin America and Africa. Concluding with examinations of Pluralism, Christian Language, and Christianity and Politics, this book offers students and other readers of social theory and sociology of religion an invaluable reappraisal of Christianity and Secularization. It represents the most comprehensive sociology of contemporary Christianity, set in historical depth.
Download or read book XV International Scientific Conference INTERAGROMASH 2022 written by Alexey Beskopylny and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-24 with total page 3148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book contains proceedings of the XV International Scientific Conference INTERAGROMASH 2022, Rostov-on-Don, Russia. This conference is dedicated to the innovations in the field of precision agriculture, robotics and machines, as well as agriculture biotechnologies and soil management. It is a collection of original and fundamental research in such areas as follows: unmanned aerial systems, satellite-based applications, proximal and remote sensing of soil and crop, positioning systems, geostatistics, mapping and spatial data analysis, robotics, and automation. Potential and prospects for the use of hydrogen in agriculture, for example, in high-performance tractors with hybrid electric transmission, are disclosed in the research works of scientists from all over the world. It also includes such topics as precision horticulture, precision crop protection, differential harvest, precision livestock farming, controlling environment in animal husbandry, and other topics. One of the important issues raised in the book is to ensure the autonomy of local farms. The topic of the impact of the agro-industrial sector on the environment also received wide coverage. Ways to reduce the burden on the environment are proposed, and the use of alternative fuels and fertilizers is suggested. The research results presented in this book cover the experience and the latest studies on the sustainable functioning of agribusiness in several climatic zones. The tundra and taiga, forest-steppe, the steppe and semi-desert—all this is a unique and incredibly demanded bank of information, the main value of which is the real experience of the functioning of agribusiness in difficult climatic and geographic conditions. These materials are of interest for professionals and practitioners, for researchers, scholars, and producers. They are used in the educational process at specific agricultural universities or during vocational training at enterprises and also become an indispensable helper to farm managers in making the best agronomic decisions.
Download or read book Handbook of Leaving Religion written by Daniel Enstedt and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Leaving Religion introduces a neglected field of research with the aim to outline previous and contemporary research, and suggest how the topic of leaving religion should be studied in the future. The handbook consists of three sections: 1) Major debates about leaving religion; 2) Case studies and empirical insights; and 3) Theoretical and methodological approaches. Section one provides the reader with an introduction to key terms, historical developments, major controversies and significant cases. Section two includes case studies that illustrate various processes of leaving religion from different perspectives, and each chapter provides new empirical insights. Section three discusses, presents and encourages new approaches to the study of leaving religion.
Download or read book The Territories of Human Reason written by Alister E. McGrath and published by Ian Ramsey Centre Studies in S. This book was released on 2019 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our understanding of human rationality has changed significantly since the beginning of the century, with growing emphasis being placed on multiple rationalities, each adapted to the specific tasks of communities of practice. We may think of the world as an ontological unity-but we use a plurality of methods to investigate and represent this world. This development has called into question both the appeal to a universal rationality, characteristic of the Enlightenment, and also the simple 'modern-postmodern' binary. The Territories of Human Reason is the first major study to explore the emergence of multiple situated rationalities. It focuses on the relation of the natural sciences and Christian theology, but its approach can easily be extended to other disciplines. It provides a robust intellectual framework for discussion of transdisciplinarity, which has become a major theme in many parts of the academic world. Alister E. McGrath offers a major reappraisal of what it means to be 'rational' which will have significant impact on older discussions of this theme. He sets out to explore the consequences of the seemingly inexorable move away from the notion of a single universal rationality towards a plurality of cultural and domain-specific methodologies and rationalities. What does this mean for the natural sciences? For the philosophy of science? For Christian theology? And for the interdisciplinary field of science and religion? How can a single individual hold together scientific and religious ideas, when these arise from quite different rational approaches? This ground-breaking volume sets out to engage these questions and will provoke intense discussion and debate.
Download or read book Varieties of Religion Today written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-30 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterpiece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place. Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.
Download or read book The Broken Covenant written by Robert Neelly Bellah and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: